Symbiotic Sustainable Practices
Introduction to sustainable practice for the professions around design
Gonzalo Raineri
Designer and educator
About this course
Sustainability is decided long before anything is designed: in the report that sets the budget, the policy that fixes the rules, the plan that allots the land, the article that frames the debate. The professions that write them are asked for sustainable outcomes and given no way to read what their documents set in motion.
Symbiotic Design gives them that way. It reads a piece of professional work as relations between the people who ask for it, the people it is about, the resources it commits, the money, and the years its effects last. Each relation is weighed against the others, with ethics first, so the practitioner sees where the work gives and where it takes.
This course teaches both sides of the work: setting the conditions a project is made in so that the sustainable choice is the possible one, and defending them to the people who sign them off. Each decision is argued with Symbiotic Design. That way the practitioner leads and can explain every one.
You leave able to set sustainable conditions in your own field and defend them to the people who decide.
What you will be able to do
- Read a report, a plan, a budget or a policy for what it sets in motion, and for whom.
- Set the conditions that make the sustainable choice possible for the people who will design and build under them.
- Differentiate between a Tame Problem a method can solve and a Wicked Problem that keeps changing while you work on it, and learn to work on both.
- Defend each condition to the people who sign it off, in terms they accept.
- Weigh each decision against the people, the resources, the money and the years it will last, with ethics first.
Your instructor
Founder of the Academy, Bioclimatic Architect and expert in Symbiotic Design, the new frontier for sustainability